Group Self-help Goals On Target

March 28, 1985

BARRIERS TO the establishment of black-owned businesses, and to their growth, often can be overcome by a cooperative effort of black groups.

That statement is the reason for existence of a new organization in Broward County, the Council for Black Economic Development. Unlike most organizations, it has no budget and no staff. But it has self-help goals that can be reached and should be encouraged:

(BU) Help black business people hurdle such traditional barriers as negotiating bank loans or getting bonded.

(BU) Identify at least 15 black-owned businesses in Broward that have the potential of growing to significant size, then help them to do that.

(BU) Obtain assurance that government and private industry will consider black-owned businesses in awarding contracts.

Most of that has been attempted on a scattered, piecemeal and too-often ineffective basis by existing groups in Broward County.

So they banded together in an ``umbrella`` organization, the new council, to get their act together -- literally.

Among members of the new council are the NAACP, the Urban League, the Minority Builders Coalition, the Broward Economic Development Corp. and development corporations from Deerfield Beach, Hallandale and Dania.

The new group has set ambitious goals, but the organizers are determined to accomplish them and have devised a four-year plan to do so.

In identifying 15 existing black-owned businesses, for example, the organizers intend to show the owners exactly how to have the best chance of achieving revenues of $1 million a year.

This is the kind of self-help approach that so many critics of government aid to minorities long have advocated. Now that approach is being emphasized by the new council, and it`s time for those who advocated it to support it.